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Room temperature qubits in silicon carbide defects discovered by David Awschalom's group

An article in January's Physics Today highlights the excitement of a discovery made by the Awschalom group.

From the article:
"How could a divacancy—a little bit of nothing—be regarded as a qubit? In fact, the qubit comprises the collective of atoms in the vicinity of the vacancy. Electrons that would have been bound to Si or C in the unblemished lattice are left unpaired and localized at the divacancy. Like diamond’s NV centers, those electron spin states, as well as those of SiC’s two unidentified defects, can be read via optical fluorescence."

Graduate student William Koehl is one of the authors of the original paper.